My cafetiere is pink. Shocking pink. I am shocked myself, as I reckon now I must be the most middle-class person ever to have lived. For this is one of the ways we now reckon class. According to pollsters. So disturbed was I that I checked its make. Boden? Aaaah! No, Bodum, and I need glasses. This is not product placement by the way, I am simply trying to place myself in class terms. If class is now deemed to be about what one consumes as opposed to being about what one produces, I might as well put it out there: my coffee maker. Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my penchant for vividly coloured kitchenware.

Posher friends, or at least some people who claim to know about food, scoff at my cafetiere and say I should make coffee in those proper French metal things, and they are probably right and they shall inherit the land.

I won't inherit the land, nor, I imagine, will the classes who drink instant coffee. They probably don't deserve to. I mean, have they no aspirations, these non-real-coffee-drinking low-lifes? They are probably the same type of people whose children don't read 50 books a year, I bet. Really, there is no hope.

Seven out of 10 people now define themselves as middle class, so we may just look up or down on the three who don't. Presumably they just tick the box marked "non–dom" or "can't be arsed". Who is to know?

But really there is more to it than cappuccinos. I am shocked at the bloodless coup that has been achieved here. As social mobility has faltered over the last 20 years, we have the majority of people "self-certifying" as middle class. Certified is the right word, if you ask me. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. Delusions of being middle class when you earn less than the average income, and are indeed struggling, may suggest the class war is not going that well. It's really difficult maintaining a class war when everyone says that they are on the same side. And believe me, I try.

I hate to argue with Lady Gaga (deeply middle class) but I wasn't Born This Way. I was born another way and got on and got out somehow. My cohort is probably the last generation to achieve real social mobility. And if you now look at the studies, despite the myth constantly repeated, it's not grammar schools that made the difference.

To change one's class position leaves one in a kind of no-man's land, unable to share the nostalgia for the good old working classes, but always willing and able to rubbish one's new milieu. Much about working-class life is deathly dull and about anaesthetising oneself into numbing stupidity. The nobility of manual work was a necessary fiction. No man would live half their lives underground if they had another choice. No woman now happily gets up in the middle of the night and leaves her children to go and clean office floors.

What has happened is that the main political parties cottoned on to the idea of aspiration being a vote-winner exactly at the same time when those aspirations could not be met for many in a globalised economy. Home-owning, self-reliance, a decent job for life, nice holidays, a taste for authenticity and real "experiences" came to define us. What we bought, rather than what we produced, became our core identity. As any fule kno, or OK, any old Marxist, this is not what social class actually means. This is reducing class to the trivia of etiquette and consumer power.

The reality has been that as we produce fewer and fewer goods, our patterns of employment have become more haphazard and confused across the class spectrum. People on incredibly low wages are still required to look smart, present immaculate CVs and be respectful, even when on hideously short-term contracts. This may make them "feel" middle class.

Alongside this, every politician has tried to wrap us up in some warm, fuzzy blanket of uniform classlessness. Last year Gordon Brown was promising that Labour would create "more middle-class jobs than ever", and would also represent "the mainstream majority". What on earth did this mean? Is it any more true than Osborne's more obvious lie, "We're all in this together"?

The coercion of smooth, achievable middle classness was brought about under New Labour. Triangulation, remember, meant there need be no more class conflict or fights between workers and bosses. We were just floating in a perfectly harmonious world where things could only get better.

The real working class remained problematic, and the workless morphed into what we now call the underclass. When Charles Murray started using that word in the mid-90s we reeled. The poor were not just people, he said, who didn't have money, they were also morally impoverished. Now we use that word and others like it all the time: Chavs, "urban", people from estates. Look at these people and their vulgar desire for instant gratification. Even instant coffee.

Middle-class "values", on the other hand, mean what? Some idea of restraint, of naturally knowing what's good and being prepared to work for it. And, er, having a Ford Focus. If you don't mind being defined by vote-hungry politicians or people who want to sell you stuff, then go for it!

But I am sorry to say that when you are earning less than the average wage, even though your work may be sedentary rather than manual, don't kid yourself, people. This is a massive scam, this horrible mutation of all into some homogenised vision of middle-classness.

The old word for it was hegemony. Which, I can see, is as about as fashionable as class war. But when Gramsci described a culture in which the ruling class "persuades" the lower classes to accept its values, he could have had little idea of how parties of "the left" would also bring this about. But the rush for the centre ground means just that. The old collectivities of unions or the bonds of manual work have given way to individual fear and loathing in the workplace. Technology means outsourcing, and has been a liberation for some, but for others it means total loss of autonomy, and a working life that is under constant observation.

The problem now is that mere aspiration, middle-class or not, is not enough. As if it ever was. The much-derided aspiration of the young – to become famous without necessarily having any talent – is no less nutty than many current political aspirations. We are to have growth without investment. Daft. We are all to stand tall and proud while we lop off the limbs of the public sector. Crazy.

I don't know what class of people will be protesting today. They may well be squeezed. Strugglers, downsizers. Or not from any of these marketing categories. They may simply be registering the fact that their individual interests are actually not those of the ruling class. Some may think they are middle class, and some indeed may be. Whether they resist the fiction that class no longer matters is surely much more significant than how they drink their coffee.

For these new decaffeinated, tepid definitions of class are nothing like the real thing. And certainly not for the likes of us.